The Virgin Lands Campaign
To fight food shortages in the 1950s the USSR embarked on a major agricultural project to develop vast areas of previously uncultivated land in northern Kazakhstan. The project attracted hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic volunteers, but decades later it led to environmental problems. Dina Newman spoke to an agricultural volunteer, Rimma Busurova. Photo: Rimma Busurova and her classmates outside their dormitory in northern Kazakhstan; credit: Rimma Busurova family archive.
17 Jul 20189min
The Killing of the Russian Tsar
The Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, four daughters and young son, were shot in the cellar of a house in Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918. Olga Romanoff is his great niece. She spoke to Olga Smirnova about his death and eventual reburial in St Petersburg. (Photo: Nicholas II, Tsar and his family. From left to right - Olga, Maria,Tsar Nicholas II,Tsarina Alexandra, Anastasia, Tsarevitch Alexei and Tatiana. Credit: Press Association
16 Jul 20188min
Italy's 'Ghost Shipwreck'
In the summer of 2001, an Italian journalist used an underwater robot to find the remains of a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily which had killed nearly 300 migrants from South Asia. At the time this was the worst disaster of its kind in the Mediterranean but the few survivors had been ignored by officials and dismissed as fantasists. The discovery of the so-called “Phantom Shipwreck” caused an outrage in Italy. Simon Watts talks to Italian journalist Giovanni Maria Bellu and the former Observer correspondent in Rome, John Hooper, who also investigated the tragedy.(Photo: The remains of the "Ghost Shipwreck" filmed off the Sicilian coast. Credti: EPA/ANSA/La Repubblica)
13 Jul 20188min
The Spiegel Affair
In the early 1960s a magazine article about West Germany's defence capabilities led to the imprisonment of seven journalists, a vehement debate about press freedom and a full-blown government crisis. Tim Mansel has been speaking to Franziska Augstein about her father Rudolf Augstein's part in the Spiegel Affair.Photo: Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the magazine 'Spiegel' is escorted by the police. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images
12 Jul 20188min
Smiling Buddha: India's First Nuclear Test
The inside story of how India secretly developed and exploded an atomic device in 1974. India called it a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion, though the experimental device was in effect a plutonium bomb. The test was seen as a triumph of Indian science and technology, but it led to the suspension of international nuclear co-operation with India, and spurred Pakistan to speed up development of its own nuclear bomb. Alex Last spoke to S.K Sikka, one of India's leading nuclear scientists, about his role in the secret project, code-named Smiling Buddha.Photo: A crater marks the site of the first Indian underground nuclear test conducted 18 May 1974 at Pokhran in the desert state of Rajasthan. (PUNJAB PHOTO/AFP/Getty Images)
11 Jul 20189min
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
In 1958 Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, published his first book "Things Fall Apart". It was set in pre-colonial rural Nigeria and examines how the arrival of foreigners led to tensions within traditional Igbo society. The book revolutionised African writing, and began a whole new genre of world literature. In 2016 Rebecca Kesby spoke to Achebe's youngest daughter, Nwando Achebe.(Photo: Chinua Achebe in 2002. Photo Credit: Reuters/Ralph Orlowski/Files )
10 Jul 20189min
Kosovo: 'Madeleine's War'
When war broke out in Kosovo in 1998, Nato intervened with air-strikes. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was the main proponent for military action. She explains to Rebecca Kesby why she argued for action, and tells her own remarkable story, from a childhood in Czechoslovakia to the highest political office ever held by a woman in the United States at the time. (Photo: Madeleine Albright. Credit US Government)
5 Jul 201810min
Playgrounds Made of Junk
Post-war Britain saw a rise in makeshift adventure playgrounds born out of bomb sites. Children were provided with tools and raw materials, to build whatever they wanted to play with, using their own imagination. Anya Dorodeyko spoke to Tony Chilton, an early "playworker" and champion of adventure playgrounds in the UK about their boom in the 1970s.Picture: children playing on an adventure playground in London in the 1970s (Credit: BBC)
5 Jul 20189min
